Houston-based ConocoPhillips didn't have to invent a state-of-the-art treasury operation. It already had one, using SAP's treasury and risk management module within its single global SAP ERP system. But it had to clone that operation quickly and seamlessly when the board of directors decided to split the company in two, making ConocoPhillips an independent exploration and production company with $65 billion in projected annual revenue and putting the downstream businesses into a new company, Phillips 66, with projected revenue of about $190 billion. To minimize the changes, the company decided not to use any new systems or providers. But extensive, complex streams of payments and receipts had to be surgically separated so that each company would be operating securely and efficiently from the go-live date of May 1.

 A global treasury separation project team started working in January with the company's three banks, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank. "All receipts and disbursements, including lockbox, wires, checks and ACH activities, had to be coordinated across the various groups," notes Tammy Burks, director of cash and reconciliations at Conoco. "Because transactions were commingled under ConocoPhillips' pay-and-receive-on-behalf-of structure, a whole year's worth of data from more than 700 accounts globally had to be analyzed to identify each bank account's activity and supporting processes."

The team scrupulously captured a detailed inventory of every account type, file format, data integration requirement and connectivity protocol, segregated according to which company each would belong to. Bank accounts associated with downstream businesses migrated to Phillips 66, while those that were commingled or associated with the upstream business remained with Conoco-Phillips. New accounts were established as needed. It helped that treasury had spent the last three years standardizing transactional processing tools and processes across the globe.